First impressions… the Samsung GX20 dSLR

Following on from my last post…

Well, having just come into possession of a new camera I simply couldn’t resist having a play prior to taking it out “for real”. Who could?

And, as is fairly usual with me, optimism thrust common sense aside even before I’d switched the damn thing on. So, a few shots indoors then, a day or so later, wander outside and fire off a few shots; then scurry back indoors to quickly transfer them to the computer so that I could become ecstatic over the truly wonderful results.

My first impressions?

Hmm.

I say again, hmm. (Not even an exclamation mark, you’ll notice!)

Well, I’ve gotta be brutally honest and confess that first impressions were somewhat less than favourable. But I also have to be sensible about this, put aside my initial disappointment, and admit that after a rational analysis of the results the camera itself is a reasonably significant improvement over its forerunner, the GX10.

To explain…

Firstly, the RAW files are absolutely huge. To give you a rough idea, the Canon’s come out at an average of about 11/12Mb, the GX10’s at an average of about 16/17Mb… but this beast is consistently producing files of around 24Mb!

Now bearing in mind that on the present laptop I’m using to process pics it struggles when importing the GX10’s files into Lightroom, all I can say is that these massive 24Mb files had my machine whimpering, cringeing, and begging for mercy.
It was a struggle just to get them loaded into Lightroom, and I eventually had to resort to importing them one at a time!

So, before even looking at the results, my opinion was already somewhat jaundiced.

Anyway, having (finally) overcome that hurdle, things began to start looking up. At the thumbnail stage anyway.
There was little evidence of the vignetting that so afflicts shots taken with the GX10 (though that’s actually a lens issue), and that consistently blueish cast I seem to get with the GX10 has disappeared. In fact, the overall colour balance seemed to be a much more accurate representation than I’ve ever achieved straight off-camera from the GX10, or for that matter from the Canon. I’d fired all the shots in this initial batch with the camera set to auto white balance and auto ISO and, though I tweaked the wb slightly in post-processing, that was literally a tweak rather than a major edit.
That said, all the shots seemed to require significantly more “vibrancy” and “saturation” than I’ve been accustomed to applying… which may simply be evidence that the AdobeRGB colourspace I select as default is actually being applied more effectively.

Which suggests that the new processor has an impact other than on just the JPEGS… and a positive one at that. Excellent!

But then I looked at the images in larger size and rapidly the suspicion formed in my mind that detail resolution is nowhere near as good as with the GX10. This was majorly disappointing cos, with 14.6megapixels I was expecting much greater detail resolution. I could be mistaken of course and clearly need a more extensive session with a wider range of subjects to verify this or not, as the case may be. In any event, that’s more likely to be another lens issue. (I’ll probably have a go at trying the lens from the GX10 on the camera and see what results I get from that; which should, at the very least, clarify things a bit.)

Well, that’s about it for the mo’.

I’m not as excited by the results as I thought I would have been, or feel I should have been… but rationality dictates that the issues disturbing me are not actually the fault of the camera at all but of the computer (the file size/importing/processing time issue) and the lens (the detail resolution issue).

So, I need a computer with significantly more RAM and a different/better lens before I can really make a definitive assessment.

Bugger!